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ia during the fifteenth century B.C., as revealed in the letters from Tell el-Amarna. But a moment's thought will show that the cases are not similar. The Egyptian or Syrian scribe employed Babylonian as a medium for his official foreign correspondence because Babylonian at that period was the _lingua franca_ of the East. But the object of the early Elamite rulers was totally different. Their inscribed bricks and memorial stelae were not intended for the eyes of foreigners, but for those of their own descendants. Built into the structure of a temple, or buried beneath the edifice, one of their principal objects was to preserve the name and deeds of the writer from oblivion. Like similar documents found on the sites of Assyrian and Babylonian cities, they sometimes include curses upon any impious man, who, on finding the inscription after the temple shall have fallen into ruins, should in any way injure the inscription or deface the writer's name. It will be obvious that the writers of these inscriptions intended that they should be intelligible to those who might come across them in the future. If, therefore, they employed the Babylonian as well as the Elamite language, it is clear that they expected that their future readers might be either Babylonian or Elamite; and this belief can only be explained on the supposition that their own subjects were of mixed race. It is therefore certain that at this early period of Elamite history Semitic Babylonians and Elamites dwelt side by side in Susa and retained their separate languages. The problem therefore resolves itself into the inquiry: which of these two peoples occupied the country first? Were the Semites at first in sole possession, which was afterwards disputed by the incursion of Elamite tribes from the north and east? Or were the Elamites the original inhabitants of the land, into which the Semites subsequently pressed from Babylonia? A similar mixture of races is met with in Babylonia itself in the early period of the history of that country. There the early Sumerian inhabitants were gradually dispossessed by the invading Semite, who adopted the civilization of the conquered race, and took over the system of cuneiform writing, which he modified to suit his own language. In Babylonia the Semites eventually predominated and the Sumerians as a race disappeared, but during the process of absorption the two languages were employed indiscriminately. The kings of the Fir
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